Unbreak Me
by ALoversDream
Summary: Imagine request: Imagine the reader struggles with self-harm and depression, and one day Dean catches her. Fluff ensues. TW for descriptions of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and mentions of blood.


**Imagine:** One shot where the reader is dealing with self-harm and depression. Dean finds her one night and flufffffff.

 **Requested by:**

 **Pairing:** Dean x Reader (Female)

 **Rating:** M

 **Word Count: 2217**

 **TW:** Descriptions of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and blood.

"Y/N," Dean called from the window of the impala. "Sam and I won't be back until late tonight. Surveillance should last most of the night. Go ahead and get some sleep. We'll see you tomorrow."

Nodding and waving, with a bright smile on your face, you stood waiting in the doorway for the boys to pull away. When they were gone, you stepped inside, shut the door and leaned against it with a heavy sigh, letting your eyes fall shut. This was more than just the pressure from an impending hunt. It was more than the typical stresses that came with lying to get information. It was more than being absolutely exhausted from the minimal sleep you had been getting lately. It was the cold, dark chill of depression creeping up over your shoulders, washing over your head, plunging you into an ocean of obscurity. You could feel it wrapping its arms around your chest, slowly making it harder and harder to breathe.

It was the impending doom of anxiety. It was the ripple of nausea that swept through your stomach, climbing, clawing up the back of your throat. The anxiety that felt like grit under your eyelids during the day, making it nearly impossible to focus on anything the boys were telling you. The anxiety that burrowed itself deep into your brain so that it could whisper into your ear at night all the things that were wrong with you, every moment you had messed something up during the day, making it impossible to look Sam or Dean in the eye. What in the world made you think that you were good enough to consider yourself one of them? You were stupid. You knew that, right?

Today, when you and Sam had interviewed the daycare worker that saw the second murder, you had stuttered over your title when she had questioned your badge. Sam had given you that look, the one that told you that if you weren't careful you'd ruin everything, and you felt the lump that had formed in your throat slip down and settle itself firmly in the pit of your stomach. The near slip-up had you so worried about messing up again that you passed on lunch to study the interview notes with a bit more intensity. When Dean had asked about your refusal to eat, you had passed it off on having had a big breakfast. Truth was, you hadn't been very hungry lately.

Every day was a struggle. Every morning you woke up and had to force yourself to get out of bed. Every day you had to set an alarm on your phone to remind yourself to shower, because lately, doing so had seemed so exhausting. You had thrown yourself into research and interviews, because at least for a little bit you didn't have to think about how much you felt like shit. Every day you could feel the weight of the depression building, and over the past few days, your skin had started to itch. Not literally, of course, but there was the itch beneath your skin. The one that was begging to be scratched. And you could do so oh, so easily. Especially since the boys wouldn't be back until the morning.

Sliding down the door, you wrapped your arms around your legs, tears pricking the corners of your eyes. Your fingertips began to tingle, the surefire sign that you were about to shift into a full blown breakdown. You wanted to cut. The desire pulling at your chest was more than the desire to eat, or sleep, or breathe. You needed to feel it. But you didn't want it at the same time. You had refrained from self-harming for several months now, and you knew that the second you gave in, you were going to want it every day. It was an addiction. Some people had pot, some people had meth, some people had alcohol, and you? You had cutting.

Before you realized what you were doing, you were on your feet, moving mechanically to the bathroom. The house had gone oddly silent, and it wasn't until you reached your hand up to your face that you realized it was wet with tears; you had been sobbing loudly. Your blood pounded in your ears as you knelt in your bathroom by the drawers by your sink, pushing the bathroom door shut on your way to the tile. Your heartbeat thrummed in your fingers, sending them into tremors as you reached for the handle. The pounding in your ears and chest and fingers reminded you of when you were a kid and you were doing something you knew you shouldn't be. As if any moment you would be found out. In the drawer, there was a pack of razor blades. Two were missing; they had been used in an appropriate manner. One for your razor in the caddy in the shower, one had been used for first aid after a particularly nasty hunt. And there was one left. One for this purpose.

As you slid the razor blade out of the drawer, and out of its packaging, you hesitated. In the past you had cut on your arms, but with how often you had to change your shirt in front of the guys, and how hot this summer had been, there was no way you could do that without raising questions. So instead you stood and unbuttoned your jeans, sliding them off of your hips and casting them in the far corner of the bathroom. Then settling back pressed against the bathtub and your feet pressed against the bathroom cabinets, you picked up the blade, tracing it carefully across your skin. At the top of your thigh, an area that would be easily covered with shorts, you sucked in a deep breath and dragged the razor across your skin.

Your breath hissed out between your parted lips as you clenched your teeth. The high was instantaneous. All your focus was solely on the thin cut across your leg. But as soon as the high was there, it was gone. So you lowered the blade to your leg again and cut a second time. Third time. And then you lifted your blade for a fourth cut when the bathroom door flew opened, causing the blade to clatter out of your hand onto the tile below you, joining the scarlet droplets that had begun to gather there. A scream echoed in the room as you clapped a hand over your mouth, your eyes traveling up the barrel of the gun to Dean's green eyes. When he noticed that it was you, and you alone, in the bathroom, fear reflecting in your eyes, he placed the gun on the counter dropping to his knees on the tile beside you. You struggled to find the words to ask him what the hell he was doing there, but found none.

"Oh, Y/N," he said softly, as he adjusted so that he was sitting next to you, careful not to touch you. "What happened?"

"How did you…get in?"

"You left the door unlocked. And I could hear you crying from the entryway so I naturally assumed something had gotten you."

You hadn't realized you had been crying so loud. In fact, you hadn't realized that you had been crying at all. You thought you had been calm through the whole thing, you had felt calm.

"Why did you come back?"

He didn't say anything for a moment, his eyes focused instead on your legs, mottled with old and newer scars, the few on your thighs beginning to sting. Slowly he reached for the drawer across from you, pulling out antiseptic and bandages so carefully, you were reminded of a video you had seen when you were a child of a cat trying to pull porcupine quills out of a dog's nose without getting bitten. "I came back because you've been off your game all week. And I've been watching you get consistently worse each day, and it made me nervous. You skipped lunch today, claiming that you had a big breakfast, but I woke you up and I know that you didn't have time to eat. Yesterday you looked like you were about to cry when Sam asked you where you put his FBI badge. The day before that, it took me three tries to get you out of bed."

While he was talking, his hands moved deftly, opening a bottle of rubbing alcohol, unwrapping gauze. When you didn't say anything, he sighed softly, reaching out carefully to slide the blade away from you, streaking droplets of blood across the white tile. He then tipped the bottle of alcohol onto the gauze and pressed it to your leg, causing you to flinch with the sting.

You couldn't say anything. How could you tell him how you felt? How could you tell him, the man that had literally been to hell in back, that you wanted to hurt yourself? That you hated yourself? You couldn't. Because doing so trivialized the sacrifices he and Sam had made for you and others that they loved. And you couldn't tell him because you loved him, and if you told him, you knew things would never be the same again. He'd always see you as his unstable little sister. And besides, this was humiliating. The secret you had been trying for so hard to keep from him he suddenly knew. And it wasn't like the way it was when other friends had found out. They found out when it was summer and you wore tanktops and shorts and your scars were out in the open. But you had been so careful not to show the boys. So careful.

You didn't speak while Dean patched up your wounds, cleaning them expertly, checking them to see if you needed stitches. He applied an antiseptic to fight infection and wrapped it to keep out bacteria. And silently, without talking, he slid an arm under your legs and one behind your back, scooping you up and carrying you to your room. He laid you gently in your bed and crawled up beside you brushing your hair out of your face.

"Y/N," Dean sighed softly, "You haven't talked to me since I walked in. You wanna talk to me about what's going on?"

You didn't say anything for a while, but when you did open your mouth, you couldn't stop the flow of words. "I have been fighting this battle for eleven years, and I'm so tired. I'm too young to feel this old. I have made promises to friends, ex-boyfriends, and ex-almosts for nearly as long as I have been fighting. But I never made the same promise to myself. Because it's hard. It's a battle. And you don't make promises in battle, because you never know what's going to happen from day to day. One day, it may be absolutely perfect, an easy road with very little bumps, and the next day you can't make it up the hill because the ruts are too deep, and the skies are too cloudy, and the enemy is perched at the top of the hill, ready to beat you down as soon as you get a foothold. It's so much easier to casually say "I won't anymore, because you asked me to," and fall right back into the same habits when they walk away. Because everyone walks away at some point. This is too much for people to handle. They didn't ask for this when they signed up to be around me."

"And that's why I didn't tell you anything. Because you don't get it, Dean. And I knew that as soon as I told you, you would distance yourself. And I don't want you to because-" You stopped, fighting back tears, swallowing hard several times before you spoke again. "I need you to stay. I need you."

Dean slid down wrapping his arms tightly around you, holding you to his chest. "I do get it. How many times do you think Sam and I have stood where you are? Sam threw himself into the pits of hell. I've done so many reckless things because I just don't like myself anymore. You cut yourself, we try to get ourselves killed. So I'm not leaving. I know you, Y/N, as well as I know myself. I'm not leaving."

As the sky outside your window turned dark, Dean laid by your side, brushing your hair off of your face and whispering stories into your ear until you fell asleep. When you would wake the next morning, the left side of your bed empty, your heart would sink in your stomach. That is, until you slid out of bed and down the hallway to the kitchen where Dean was flipping pancakes. Later that day, you would notice that he had cleaned the blood off the tiles and disposed of your razor blade. Things didn't get better overnight, but at least you knew you were loved.


End file.
